Slaughter Pen

Inside Port Hudson the siege was also a food problem. As supplies ran down, the defenders ate mule meat and rats, and scurvy, dysentery, malaria and sunstroke thinned the ranks. Desertion was a real problem, especially among Louisiana troops. Gardner began with about 7,500 men, and by one count about 900 were casualties from battle and disease by the end, though tallies differ. When the garrison surrendered on July 9, 5,935 enlisted men and civilian employees were paroled, and 405 officers were sent north.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Hudson State Historic Site — steps away
  The 48-day siege of 1863 on the Mississippi bluffs, where the Louisiana Native Guards and Captain Andre Cailloux led the first assault; earthworks, a six-mile trail and a museum.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 7.9 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 9.0 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 17 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.

More markers nearby

• Mississippi Redoubt — steps away
• Union Battery No. 3 — 0.3 mi
• Union Battery No. 4 — 0.3 mi
• Artillery Ridge — 0.4 mi